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Hammerheads natural, more efficient than their artificial derivatives

The hammerhead Ribosome natural, found in some various (small RNA of 250-400 nucleotides able to replicate and cause disease in certain plants), catalyze cis cutting their own oligomeric intermediates generated during replication by rolling circle mechanism. The hammerhead Ribosome, thanks to its structural simplicity, have been manipulated in this study to act in trans as restraining ribonucleases specific RNA, assuming that the similar catalytic behavior in this context is artificial.

However, the results obtained at the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology of Plants of Valencia (UPV-CSIC), show that this is not true, and that the hammerhead ribozymes natural ‘autocortan “much more efficiently than trans derivatives and other artificial ribozymes of this class. In addition, changes in peripheral loops 1 and 2 of natural ribozymes studied induce a reduction in catalytic constant autocorte more than 100 times, which on the one hand, shows that regions outside the conserved catalytic core play an important role in catalysis and, secondly, suggests the existence of tertiary interactions between these peripheral regions.

These interactions, dependent on the size and the sequence of loops 1 and 2, had to be shaped by natural selection to increase the catalytic activity of natural ribozymes and allow them to be functional to low magnesium levels that exist under physiological conditions. These results underscore the importance of studying the Ribosome in its natural habitat and indicate that extremely important catalytic determinants are lost in simplified versions of the same.